And then suddenly, nothing happened. Mind you, it happened suddenly.

In the absence of an actual carbon scheme to argue about, MPs are moving on to the most desperate of proxy issues.

Andrew Taylor: AAP

The Australian Parliament is suffering from advanced symptoms of the greenhouse effect.

Every day now, as the members of the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee (MPCCC) meet to thrash about miserably in the entrails of their imminent proposal for a carbon tax regime, the temperature elsewhere in Parliament House rises inexorably.

The tension is high; all this suspense, and nothing to fight about in the meantime.

It's getting unbearable.

This week, when Tony Abbott announced that he would move for a national plebiscite to double-check his strong hunch that Australians would be opposed to Ms Gillard's filthy thieving tax scheme (whatever it might be), the Prime Minister's troops defended their as-yet-undisclosed scheme bravely (Oooohhhh! It is so not going to be filthy and thieving! It's going to be fair and redistributive! Whatever it ends up being!)

The plebiscite has not been approved. It will not be approved. It was never going to be approved. And yet Parliament could speak of little else for two days. For an entirely fictional democratic instrument, it certainly got plenty of attention.

For Mr Abbott's purposes, it's fine for the exercise to be flimsy, so long as it reminds people of a core failing of the Prime Minister's; simply by canvassing an exercise in listening to the populace, the Opposition leader evokes memories of the PM's broken promise. So focused is Mr Abbott on this aspect of the stunt that he readily admitted he'd never be foolish enough to consider himself actually bound by it.

(Next week, if the greenhouse effect continues to mount, he'll be off publicly proposing marriage to a string of Canberra barmaids, just to remind folk that the PM lives in sin.)

But the parliamentary greenhouse effect didn't stop there.

On Tuesday night, driven mad by the oppressive conditions, a group of MPs in the House of Representatives resorted to one of the most destructive and nihilistic pastimes in the parliamentary repertoire; procedural warfare.

Procedural warfare is what happens when bored politicians have nothing useful to do.

Rather than potter off and answer constituent letters, they organise arcane humiliations for each other on the floor of parliament, extracting deep joy from each Byzantine victory.

"Gotcha! I called quorum and totally ruined your adjournment speech about aphids!"

"Yeah? Well, in your face, Bozo. I just moved that you be no longer heard!"

And so on. In the absence of an actual carbon scheme to argue about, MPs are moving on to the most desperate of proxy issues.

Yesterday, conditions worsened.

Julie Bishop set up an elaborate question and supplementary in order to induce Kevin Rudd to use the word "Bougainville" in a sentence (the term by which, stripped of surplus vowels, he is reputed to refer to The Lodge, these days)

When he obliged, explaining that the Government continued to be "very much seized by" the urgency of the Bougainville peace process, the Coalition dissolved into clapping and squealing.

Bob Katter raised a perfectly sensible question about indigenous land titles systems, but was slightly upstaged by his fellow cross bench MPs, who donned sparkly plastic hats as he asked his question (they had been looking all happy and mischievous all Question Time, giggling and passing around brown paper bags with the hats in them.

Later, Mr Katter tried to suspend Parliament to have a debate about whether Johnathan Thurston had been unfairly hauled before the tribunal.

Whatever the hell that Multi-Party Climate Change Committee comes up with, it had better do it quickly. And until then, the most humane thing would probably just be to just shut the whole parliament down until there's actually something to argue about.